All these feelings have been building for a long time. Usually I keep my mouth shut because, frankly, a lot of my friends are still invested in a lot of ideas that are just silly when it comes to actually fixing the problem. But I guess I'm finally just so pissed off at our reluctance to really grapple with our dependence on foreign oil and our inability to really talk about the real issues that, well, I've actually stopped caring what they're going to think. I guess I'm just more fed up with politicians of both parties who would rather point fingers than get down to business. And I'm upset with all of us who have let them get away with it including myself.
Here's the main clue, folks, the fact that nobody really wants to talk about.
You can't conserve your way out of this coming gas shortage, and you can't drill your way out either.
You have to do both. And that's just in the short run so we can stretch out the supplies long enough that maybe, just maybe, we can successfully transition to the post-oil world before it transitions without us.
And here's the fact that almost nobody says out loud, most especially politicians.
Gas is too cheap. This is particularly true if we want to use less of it. Keeping the price low just means that we use as much of it as we can get our hands on.
But, of course, cheap gas is a political war cry. When prices rise, we demand investigations of oil companies and politicians say they'll do everything they can to get the price down and the news media covers the whole thing like it's World War III. It's insane. We want it for the lowest possible price and, unless there's a problem with that, we don't really care where it comes from.
Probably half the people reading this blog weren't even alive when the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo hit. I'd just gone off to college where I was thrilled to have my used 1965 Ford Mustang to get around in, and pretty scared when it turned out that in order to drive it I had to wait five or six hours in a gas line to get not even a full tank of gas. Trust me, we don't want to go there again, but we could... and a lot faster than anybody wants to believe.
Think about this. Back in 1973, when that oil crisis just clobbered us, we imported a whopping 34.8 percent of our oil. Thank God we've wised up, right? Not so fast. Today we import 60.3 percent.
When I was waiting in line in 1973, if someone had told me that past the turn of the century, we'd have gotten that much worse, I never would have believed them. Back then we all thought to ourselves, "Never again." If I'd have pictured the world of 2007, it would have been one of mass transit, small cars, and a conservation ethic in full bloom.
Instead we are more exposed than ever and our dependence simply gives more and more power to the least stable part of the planet. A lot of people who hate Americans are in charge of selling us the gas that keeps our cars and our economy running. Who let this happen?
The answer, of course, is everybody. People didn't hold their representatives accountable, and the politicians hardly wanted to propose anything that would actually hurt to implement. And before you make snide remarks about President Bush and his friends in Big Oil, just stop. This isn't one that can be blamed on him. I wish he was interested in doing more, but Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton all failed to bite the bullet on this one. And so did each and every congress over the past three decades. Because, hey, if gas ever gets as expensive as it deserves to be, given what a precious resource it is, governments will fall. People are willing to pay more per ounce for bottled water than they are for refined gasoline. Where's the sense in this?
The Washington Post's columnist Charles Krauthammer really nails the nonsense factor in a column today. He makes the point that I feel so acutely today: that we are, even now, just talking more bullshit to each other. The very things we should do, if we truly want to get started, well, we aren't even thinking about them. They're all off-the-table. The only things on the table either won't work period, or are too long term to help us move quickly.
We can argue all we want about Iraq and whether getting out or staying in is the right thing for our nation's security. I simply argue that the far bigger issue right now is to stop doing what we're doing, grow a set of political balls, and make some tough decisions. But, of course, we won't. We only deal with things when they become a crisis -- like an Energy Crisis, yes?
At least when the next one hits, we'll all have our i-Pods and satellite radio to listen to in our cars as we sit idling in line, wasting more gas.
Here is the full-text of the Krauthammer column. I'm not saying the man's perfect, but at least he's willing to take a shot at it which is more than the president or the congress seem willing to do...
ENERGY NONSENSE
Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Is there anything more depressing than yet another promise of energy independence in yet another State of the Union address? By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the 1973 oil embargo have proposed solutions to our energy problem.
The result? In 1973 we imported 34.8 percent of our oil. Today we import 60.3 percent.
And what does this president propose? Another great technological fix. For Jimmy Carter, it was the magic of synfuels. For George Bush, it's the wonders of ethanol. Our fuel will grow on trees. Well, stalks, with even fancier higher-tech variants to come from cellulose and other (literal) rubbish.
It is very American to believe that chemists are going to discover the cure for geopolitical weakness. It is even more American to imagine that it can be done painlessly. Ethanol for everyone. Farmers get a huge cash crop. Consumers get more supply. And the country ends up more secure.
This is nonsense. As my colleague Robert Samuelson demonstrates, biofuels will barely keep up with the increase in gasoline demand over time. They are a huge government bet with goals and mandates and subsidies that will not cure our oil dependence or even make a significant dent in it.
Even worse, the happy talk displaces any discussion about here-and-now measures that would have a rapid and revolutionary effect on oil consumption and dependence. No one talks about them because they have unhidden costs. Politicians hate unhidden costs.
There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.
First, tax gas. The president ostentatiously rolled out his 20-in-10 plan: reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. This with Rube Goldberg regulation — fuel-efficiency standards, artificially mandated levels of "renewable and alternative fuels in 2017" and various bribes (er, incentives) for government-favored technologies — of the kind we have been trying for three decades.
Good grief. I can give you a 20-in-2: tax gas to $4 a gallon. With oil prices having fallen to $55 a barrel, now is the time. The effect of a gas-tax hike will be seen in less than two years, and you don't even have to go back to the 1970s and the subsequent radical reduction in consumption to see how. Just look at last summer. Gas prices spike to $3 — with the premium going to Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and assorted sheiks, rather than the U.S. Treasury — and, presto, SUV sales plunge, the Prius is cool and car ads once again begin featuring miles per gallon ratings.
No regulator, no fuel-efficiency standards, no presidential exhortations, no grand experiments with switchgrass. Raise the price and people change their habits. It's the essence of capitalism.
Second, immediate drilling to recover oil that is under U.S. control, namely in the Arctic and on the Outer Continental Shelf. No one pretends that this fixes everything. But a million barrels a day from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is 5 percent of our consumption. In tight markets, that makes a crucial difference.
We will always need some oil. And the more of it that is ours, the better. It is tautological that nothing more directly reduces dependence on foreign oil than substituting domestic for foreign production. Yet ANWR is now so politically dead that the president did not even mention it in the State of the Union, or his energy address the next day.
He did bring up, to enthusiastic congressional applause, global warming. No one has a remotely good idea about how to make any difference in global warming without enlisting China and India, and without destroying the carbon-based Western economy. The obvious first step, however, is an extremely powerful source of energy that produces not an ounce of carbon dioxide: nuclear.
What about nuclear waste? Well, coal produces toxic pollutants, as does oil. Both produce carbon dioxide that we are told is going to end civilization as we know it. These wastes are widely dispersed and almost impossible to recover once they get thrown into the atmosphere.
Nukes produce waste as well, but it comes out concentrated — very toxic and lasting nearly forever, but because it is packed into a small manageable volume, it is more controllable. And it doesn't pollute the atmosphere. At all.
There is no free lunch. Producing energy is going to produce waste. You pick your poison and you find a way to manage it. Want to do something about global warming? How many global warming activists are willing to say the word nuclear?
So much easier to say ethanol. That it will do farcically little is beside the point. Our debates about oil consumption, energy dependence and global warming are not meant to be serious. They are meant for show.
Krauthammer's won the Pulitzer Prize, which doesn't make him infallible, but it does make him smart. Maybe you have a better idea and we'd all love to hear that, too. Meantime, catch you in the gas lines!
It feels so unreal watching what hardships you're enduring. Because here, where I live, this is our weather report.
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